


Wet Your Whistle

by ghostyouknow



Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/M, Gen, Horses, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2013-01-03
Packaged: 2017-11-23 12:31:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/622165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostyouknow/pseuds/ghostyouknow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jared and Gen stumble into a portal and find themselves transported to a magical kingdom. Misha is the wizard who agrees to help them get back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wet Your Whistle

Gen patted Jared's neck and trained to ignore her numbing buttcheeks. She'd had horses as a kid, but it had been awhile, and this saddle wasn't exactly a nice Crosby contact. The pommel was high—almost to her navel—and the cantle was only a little lower. The seat was hard, flat leather and too wide for someone her size. The again, so was the horse.

“Can you not shift around like that? I still have a spine.” Jared's teeth clacked on his bit. He tossed his head, irritated. “Do I have to keep wearing this? It's not like you need to steer me.”

Gen sort of did need to steer him, at least until he figured out how to walk, trot and canter on four feet. They'd gotten a bit stuck only a few miles back, when they'd hit a tight dead end, and Jared realized he didn't know how to walk backwards as a horse. It didn't help that Jared had turned into a _large_ horse—at least nineteen hands, with a head longer than Gen's whole upper body and hooves the size of some smaller countries.

Gen was getting a headache, and not just because her helmet weighed fifteen pounds. She hadn't popped into a full suit of plate armor, thank goodness, but fifty pounds of chain mail was fifty pounds of chain mail, and she was half afraid her ribs were bending out of shape. “It would look weird if you didn't have a bridle, and we don't want to draw attention to ourselves, remember?”

“You're lucky talking horses are so common,” Misha said, from his own mount—a stocky, gaited pony with a thick, flaxen mane. Supposedly, it had been born a pony, but Gen wasn't sure she could take anything about this world for granted. She didn't know whether or not Misha was kidding.

She eyeballed him. Misha. He gave her a pleasant, unassuming smile and hummed to himself, blue sparks flitting about his fingers. Because while Misha might look like he should be playing hacky sack at the local drum circle, he was, in fact, a powerful wizard, and Gen and Jared's best hope of leaving Medieval Times intact.

She and Jared had planned to hike the Appalachian trail. Not the whole thing, but a small, winding sliver, perfect for a crisp autumn afternoon. They'd somehow fallen into a portal, and that portal had led them here—to the magical land where Jared was a horse, and Gen was a knight, and 'scary' did not even begin to cover it. What if they couldn't go back? What if Jared was stuck as mountain-sized livestock?

Jared snaked his head around, in that whip-fast way he could move now, and lipped the pointed toe of Gen's metal knight boot. His big, whiskery horse mouth left a slick of green-tinged saliva, and his visible eye had a rectangular pupil, but there was something very _Jared_ about the reassurance. Gen missed his big, stupid, human face.

“We'll want to cross at that bend in the stream.” Misha pointed ahead to a wide brook. “It looks like the bridge is out, but it was only ever there to benefit the local troll. The water won't go much higher than Jared's fetlocks.”

Yeah, but Jared's fetlocks were _tall_.

Gen's hands grew tighter on Jared's reins as they approached the stream. She wanted to trust Misha. She had no choice but to trust Misha. Out of the all the people she and Jared had encountered since they'd magically landed in Disneyland Gone Wrong, Misha was the only one to figure out that they didn't belong. At first glance, even. He'd also immediately volunteered his services, which was suspicious, but also welcome, because Gen didn't think she and Jared could find their own way out of this mess.  
  
Scratch that. She knew they couldn't. Jared was _a horse_.

“Are you sure it's safe?” she asked.

Misha's eyes flashed, with reflected sunlight and magic both. His grin revealed pink gums and pointed cuspids. “Of course it's not _safe_. But running water's generally less likely to be cursed than still, and it's this or cutting through frost ogre territory. They're a strange bunch, frost ogres. I'd take my chances with the stream.”

Jared shivered and shifted. Gen hoped he wasn't attempting another prance. “I don't like it,” he said. “My horsey sense is going wild.”

Gen blinked at his swiveling, furry ears. “You have a horsey sense?”

Jared snorted. “Shut up. I just don't want to put my feet in that, okay? What if there's a … thing? A monster?”

“No monster,” Misha said. “Though my little eye does spy a dead maiden.”

Jared somehow scooped to the side while also jumping up in the air, his powerful movements nearly dislodging Gen, who squealed and tried to grab his mane with chain mail covered fingers. He came to a heaving stop, his huge head raised high.

Gen stood up in the stirrups and looked between his ears, peering into the stream. Sure enough, there was human body floating face-down against the far bank, embroidered fabric and blonde hair streaming in the current.

Misha dismounted, looping his reins around the front of his own saddle. “Can I borrow your sword?”

Gen didn't have a chance to give permission or not; suddenly, her sword was in his hand.

“How can there be dead bodies? No one dies in fairy tales! I mean, they do, but it's off-screen.” Jared shifted his weight and then stumbled, and Gen was grateful for the absurdly deep seat of her saddle. If she fell, her armor would probably kill her on impact. Then again, at least she wouldn't have to experience getting trampled.

“I don't know about fairy tales, but I assure you we're all very capable of dying, and most of us don't recover.” Misha toed off his leather boots and rolled up his pants. His fat pony started eating grass.

Gen remembered the stories she'd read as a kid, full of tragedy and burning shoes and amputations, and her stomach _ached_. She drew her hands into her lap, earning a twitch from Jared when she tugged at his bit. She was pretty sure bits weren't supposed to hurt, but then neither was clothing, and her armor seriously sucked.  
  
They could die here.

Misha continued, like finding a human corpse was just another humdrum everyday occurrence: a newspaper on the front lawn. “With a gown like that, we're looking at someone high-borne. Maybe even a lesser princess. There are an awful lot of princes and princesses, perhaps because those ruling types never seem to stop remarrying …”

“Um, Misha? What are you doing with the sword?” Gen didn't like this. Not at all.

Misha paused and blinked at her, like he didn't know why Gen would ask something so obvious. “I'm going to hack her to pieces?”

“What?” Jared's screech was loud and trill, and made louder and triller by horse lungs and horse vocal chords.

“We're going to need a musical instrument,” Misha said, very slowly. “Harps are the usual thing, but since we're in a hurry, I'm thinking we could use her finger bone to make a nice whistle.”

“You're just going to walk in there and chop up the dead maiden? And make _whistles?_ From her _corpse_?” Gen fought the urge to spur Jared right then and there, like if they ran long and hard enough, they'd trip into another portal, and she'd wake up in their bed with Jared wrapped around her, and she'd hear the hear the _drip-drip-drip_ of the coffee machine brewing in the kitchen, and this would all be the most fucked up dream she'd ever had.

“Maidens don't naturally wind up in streams,” Misha said, with a stubborn flare of his nostrils. Right. Because Jared and Gen were the unreasonable pyschopaths. “It's not their normal habitat. When you find a dead maiden floating in a creek, either they drowned themselves or they were murdered.”

“Oh, because stabbing the dead body of a murder victim makes sense.” Jared tossed his head. “Should I run from him? I'm thinking this is a good time to bolt.”

Misha made a disgusted noise. “Look, I'm helping you get back to your world. That doesn't mean I no longer have any responsibilities to my own. Someone murdered this poor maid—”

“It could have been a suicide,” Jared said. “You just said so.”

“She deserves to let us know what happened.” Misha frowned. “Well, I suppose she does. Some people deserve to be murdered. But most musical instruments aren't very good liars, so she'll have to tell us if she had it coming.”

“Except for lyres, I suppose.” Gen's voice sounded faint. “They're probably not good. Liars.”

“Even them. But we can carve her into a nice, truthful flute, if that's what you're worried about.”

“Is he even speaking English?” Jared asked Gen.

Gen waved her arms, ignoring Jared's annoyed 'ow.' “Why does she need to be a musical instrument at all? Shouldn't we be giving her body back to her loved ones? Or, I dunno, sailing her off in a fiery boat? Something _respectful_.”

“Her loved ones likely murdered her.” Misha waded out into the stream, Gen's sword in hand. He'd apparently measured Jared's fetlocks as being slightly taller than his knees, though he didn't seem too bothered by the current. “Look, when you want to know how someone died, you carve their bones into musical instruments, and then you play those musical instruments.”

Jared swayed ominously. Gen slapped his butt, because he was not allowed to faint while sized like a skyscraper.

“Wait, what?” she asked.

Misha shouted to be heard over the rushing water. “Well, when you play it, it'll sing the name of the murderer. In suicides, sometimes it will sing the name of the young lad that drove the maiden to it, but once you have a suspect it's generally easier to sort everything out.”

“He is a crazy man,” Jared said. “Please tell me I can bolt? Before I hurl?”

“Horses don't throw up,” Gen told him. “They get stomachaches and die.”

Jared twitched, unhappy, and Gen regretted her big mouth. She patted his wither, but she knew it wasn't helping, because she was patting his _wither_.

Misha reached midstream. “How do you solve murders in your world?”

“We don't solve them ourselves …” Jared started.

“Um, forensic science?” Gen said.

Misha nodded, with a vague air that suggested he'd never heard the term. “You don't have to worry. This isn't my first corpse, you know. It's not even the first this week. Of course, that one was combined with a haunting, which made things easier. Tip to the wise: don't steal any gold limbs off your dead wife's body. Or attempt to screw over any fairies, well, unless you're attempting to rescue a handsome young man from their clutches. There was this one woman, just last week, she nabbed a bit of fairy ointment and applied it to her eye. She gave herself away eventually, and a fairy gentlemen plucked it right out.”

“This place is terrible.” Jared shook his massive head, ears and mane flopping.

“Remind to tell you about that time I had to convince a pretty young maiden to chop off my head. That one's a fun story.” Misha spoke too lightly, though, and Gen remembered that this place, as brutal and frightening and monstrous as it seemed to Gen and Jared, was this guy's _home_. If _he_ was a little brutal and frightening and monstrous himself … well, how could he grow up here and be anything else?

Misha reached the body and turned it over. The dead girl looked pretty and sweet, if pale. Her lips and cheeks remained rosy, though, like she'd only fallen asleep. Gen suspected this was pretty atypical for waterlogged corpses. At least it would have been in her world.

“Why are you even wading out there?” Gen asked. “Can't you float her onto the bank or something?”

Misha started wrestling the corpse onto the bank, one-handed. “Magic won't cross moving water. Everyone knows that.”

Gen hadn't misread him, then. He _was_ getting testy. “I'm sorry. I know this is your world, and you know how it works better than we do. It's just … to outsiders …”

“We don't even have magic,” Jared said. “I'm a human being. I teach kindergarten. Gen cleans teeth.”

Misha looked puzzled again. He heaved the dead girl onto the bank, and then stepped out of the water.

Gen didn't want to watch. Boy, did she not want to watch. But she couldn't take her eyes off that sword. “Doesn't this seem even a little fucked up to you?”

Misha met her eyes. There wasn't any magic in them, now, nor anything else to indicate his status as the great and powerful Oz. He looked tired and a little haggard, with too many creases around his eyes. Gen wondered about the average lifespan in this world. She doubted too many people made it long.

“Of course it's fucked up,” Misha said. “That's life.”

He raised the sword and swung it down.

_The End._


End file.
